Soaring High: Teaching Our Young Men the Winning Combination

About the author

Prof. Harris

Robert L. Harris Jr., Ph.D., is professor of African-American History and vice provost emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca. He is co-editor of "The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939.''
Prof. Harris gave the keynote address Dec. 3 at the Founders’ Day Luncheon of the Syracuse alumni chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He urged the audience to make it “cool to be a scientist who discovers and builds things.”
Prof. Harris is the national historian for Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, which was founded at Cornell in 1906.
At The Post-Standard’s request, Prof. Harris adapted and condensed his remarks, “Soaring High: Teaching Our Young Men the Winning Combination.”

"When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."

Unfortunately, we face similar problems today to those that Dr. Woodson addressed in 1933.

Too many of our young people do not know who they are, their heritage, and therefore have a difficult time determining who they want to become. Popular culture, in many respects today, controls too many young black men’s thinking. They have carved out an inferior space for themselves thinking that the deck in life is stacked against them, so why bother, and that achieving academic success is “acting white.”

The Tuskegee Airmen National MuseumPilots with the 332nd Fighter Group, part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, are shown with a P-51 Mustang. During World War II, the pilots flew missions over Italy, France, Romania, Germany and the Balkans. They overcame the bigoted belief that black men lacked intelligence, skill and courage.

I am surprised that many of my students assume that black people have always been the victims of white domination and oppression. They do not understand that Nubia and Egypt had a profound influence on Western Civilization, that Africans in the ancient world were not viewed as racially inferior. Europeans did not enslave Africans because they considered Africans inferior, but defined Africans as inferior to justify enslavement.

Black men have consistently struggled against stereotypes that would confine them to mediocre education, low-skilled employment and exclusion from certain high-status positions. When the country doubted the physical stamina and decision-making ability of black men to fly combat aircraft during World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen stepped forward to have the lowest loss record of all American escort fighter groups.

Like many young black men, he was primarily interested in basketball until he attended a summer educational opportunity program, which inspired him to seek a college education.

Shaun R. Harper and Charles H.F. Davis III, in “They (Don’t) Care about Education: A Counternarrative on Black Male Students’ Responses to Inequitable Schooling,” published in “Educational Foundations” (Winter-Spring, 2012) reveal: “the theory that blacks resist schooling has been embraced by educators and the general public and is practically regarded as common sense.” The dire statistics on low rates of high school completion for black males, academic and social disengagement, and a gap in earning college degrees have become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of the young men in their study reported growing up having never met a black person who had gone to college or to graduate school. These young men displayed “optimism in the face of despair.”

The world-renowned neurosurgeon Ben Carson's life story is an important example here. His work on separating conjoined twins has revolutionized neurosurgery.

Dr. Carson

A graduate of Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School, Carson was raised by a single mother in Detroit, Mich. In the fifth grade, he was teased by fellow students as the dumbest kid in the class. His mother, who had only a third-grade education, took matters into her own hands. Despite working two or three jobs as a domestic, she insisted that Carson and his brother read two books a week and write reports for her, which she couldn’t read, but they did not know that. Within a year and a half, he went from the bottom to the top of his class.

Carson has written in “The Big Picture” that the difference was: “in the fifth grade, I thought I was dumb, so I acted like I was dumb, and I achieved like a dumb person. As a seventh-grader I thought I was smart, so I acted and achieved accordingly.” He asked the critical question: “So what does that say about what a person thinks about his own abilities? What does this say about the importance of our self-image?”

If our young black men are to soar, if they are to achieve their potential, they must have examples of success around them, not just on the athletic field but in every endeavor. As R. Kelly sings in “I Believe I Can Fly”: “If I can see it, then I can do it; If I just believe it, there’s nothing to it.”

We need to let our young men know that there are more board-certified black cardiologists than black basketball players in the NBA. We are up against the power and might of popular culture and the tendency of young people to imitate what they see. We have an awesome responsibility to instill within them a sense of pride and to let them see the possibilities that will enable them to soar high.